Both love nests are in Brooklyn - one in an 11-room “mansion” in Dyker Heights, the other in a brownstone in Cobble Hill. Both husbands are 48, both wives in their 30s. “Two Marriages” is full of binaries: two stories about two couples, to wit - Gordo and Rita, Frank and Eleanor. But not since “The Rug Merchant” (1987) in which he conjured the lot of Cyrus Irani - an intellectual melancholic and hapless bachelor - has Lopate turned to the alchemy of fiction.
In short, he is a bookish man working in a variety of available forms on a free range of subjects. Lopate has also published poetry and film studies, his reviews and commentaries turn up in all the best journals and magazines, and he holds a chair at Hofstra and conducts workshops at Columbia, the New School and Bennington. Illustration credit: The credit on Page F8 of today’s Calendar section below the illustration of a man and woman on a couch misspells the first name of Lauren Simkin Berke as Laurn. Mencken, thence to Joan Didion and Annie Dillard. The celebrated author of half a dozen collections of literary nonfictions, including “Bachelorhood,” “Portrait of My Body” and the recent “Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan,” he is also the editor of the form’s definitive anthology, “The Art of the Personal Essay” - a truly serviceable enterprise that connects the work of Augustine and Montaigne to Hubert Butler and H.L.
Phillip Lopate is best known as an essayist. THE publication of new fictions - the first in more than 20 years - by one of our most reliable men of letters is an occasion worth marking and measuring.
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